Part 12 (1/2)

”It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money and depended on you to take me away from it always.”

”When will you marry me?”

In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though it had been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him had become an impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread again closed about her like ice. She tried, with all the force of old valuations, with even an effort to summon back the vanquished thrill, to give herself to him. But a quality overpowering and instinctive, the response of her incalculable injury, made any contact with him hateful. It was utterly beyond her power to explain. A greater mystery still partly unfolded--whatever she had hoped from Pleydon belonged to the special emotion that had possessed her since earliest childhood.

In the immediate tragedy of her helplessness, with Dodge Pleydon impatient for an a.s.surance, she paused involuntarily to wonder about that hidden imperative sense. There was a broken mental fantasy of--of a leopard bearing a woman in s.h.i.+ning hair. This was succeeded by a bright thrust of happiness and, all about her, a surging like the imagined beat of the wings of the Victory in Markue's room. Almost Pleydon had explained everything, almost he was everything; and then the other, putting him aside, had swept her back into the misery of doubt and loneliness.

”I can't marry you,” she said in a flat and dragged voice. He demanded abruptly:

”Why not?”

”I don't know.” She recognized his utter right to the temper that mastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. ”You feel that way now,” he declared; ”and perhaps next month; but you will change; in the end I'll have you.”

”No,” she told him, with a certainty from a source outside her consciousness. ”It has been spoiled.”

He replied, ”Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almost willing to stay away till you send for me. But that would only make you more stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I have no doubt I'd do better to marry a human being. Then I think we both forget how young you are--you can't pretend to be definite yet.”

He captured her hands; too exhausted for any resentment or feeling she made no effort to evade him. ”I'll never say good-bye to you.”

His voice had the absolute quality of her own conviction. To her amazement her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. ”I want to go now,”

she said unsteadily; ”and--and thank you.”

His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In reply to Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be here for, perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in New York, at the Feldts'.

In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions, the Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in the limited uncertain mirror--strong sensations, she knew, were a charge on the appearance--but she was unable to find any difference in her regular pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her careful preparations for the night, her propitiation of the only omnipotence she knew, she put out the candles of her May.

XXII

What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's coldness.

She made no reply, and found the same influence and evidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. ”We thought maybe you wouldn't care to come back here,” the latter said pointedly, over her shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. The Feldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea.

Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and expensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and the inevitable confections of silk and lace. ”It's not necessary to ask if you were right at home with your father's family,” Mrs. Condon observed with an a.s.sumed casual inattention. ”I can see you sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure.”

”We didn't speak of you,” Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost.

In support of herself Mrs. Feldt a.s.serted again that she had ”lived,”

with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and devoted attendance.

”You may be smarter than I was,” she went on, ”but what good it does you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing you're fooled before you start.” She shook out the airy breadths of a vivid echo of past daring. ”From the way you act a person might think you were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've heard your looks called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of speaking, polite. You're not even stylish any more--the line is full again and not suitable for bony shoulders and no bust.” She still cherished a complacency in her amplitude.

Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda told herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply care; that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect. But the shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.

Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her feelings from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her elaborate sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This condition, she admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it was too vulgar if for no other reason. And she determined to ask the Lowries for another and more extended invitation.

Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the airs of Gluck for her. He said little, but remained for a long while spread over the divan and watching her--in a formal chair--discontentedly. He rose suddenly and stood above her, a domineering bulk obliterating nearly everything else. In response to his demand she said, pale and composed, that she was not ”reasonable”; she omitted the ”yet” included in his question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.

When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an unrelieved depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another evidence of ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her with a furtive concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with countless small irritating complaints. It was the last day at the apartment before their departure for the summer. Linda was insuperably tired. She had gone to her room almost directly after dinner, and when a maid came to her door with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in.